Randi Antonsen

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Biography

“Beauty is everywhere” The art of Randi Antonsen

Michael Berry inquires into the motivations and inspirations of this compelling artist

“Art is fun…art is pure joy!” says Randi Antonsen, a free-form artist who knowingly breaks artistic conventions by transcending visual stereotypes, eclectically borrowing across art-styles, psychology and fashionable trends to directly communicate with her viewing audience at both an aesthetic and deeply psychological level.

The essence and sapience of Randi’s art is that it appears to function from a certain ability to free associate imagery and impressions, to borrow from here and there as the inclination strikes, to appropriate images from contemporary culture or from her fertile memory, and then scramble them, snip and paste them exploiting the “fruits of chance”; she recycles to “express whatever I want, to make an artistic statement”, and to find a physical manifestation of her original take on the ordering of her perceptions by smashing the pervading politic of modern press media across the board - including many presumptions about art practice and outcome.

And to make coherent sense out of all of this constant visual input that so dominates our minds is no mean feat. It takes immense energy, dedication and a capacity to be influenced without being swallowed up by, or becoming a preacher of, those visions.

She cites among her inspirers Frances of Assisi, Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne, Marie Curie, Vermeer, Carl Gustav Jung, Aldous Huxley and Andy Warhol.

Randi is certainly not mainstream in her approach to her art-making. Rather, she allows herself to be influenced by grace and beauty on the one hand, and also its opposite aspect ugliness on the other, albeit simultaneously.

So in her quiet way she redefines the conventional polarizing divide - the schism between conventional beauty and ugliness - by editing pictorial and graphic aspects of both and then combining them together in the one picture plane narrative, thus arriving at a previously unseen harmony.

“I always had a well developed imagination. As a child I often disappeared into a world of my own…I have this ability to see things from new angles…this has been useful for me to survive in the world,” she explains.

While at school she insightfully saw the connection between every subject, and often mixed different subjects to show the similarity and mutuality in and between each one of them. The buds of a truly holistic approach to cognisance and comprehension of moral culture were revealing themselves.

This precocious agility of Randi’s thinking, reflective state and emotion - that is her readiness to stand alone - has given rise to the fluency and panache with which she speaks visually through her artistic creations, communicating her deep passion for life on many levels while still being fully engaged with the immense spirit of livingness - of being alive.

“I mix every force that speaks to me one way or the other - I use my dreams to make art!”, she says.”

Not limited to any one medium of expression or one source of inspiration, Randi is so flexible in her graphic intelligence and its accompanying practical skills that she frequently works across the media of digital, fashion, illustration, intaglio and graphic printing, acrylic on canvas, collage and pure drawing, and is known to borrow at whim in a type of anarchic art style one-upmanship.

She fractures known images, deconstructs, disassociates and eviscerates them from their initial coherent picture plane sanctity, and then pastiches each fragment into an invigorated context where meanings, undertones and previous assumptions are reborn to satisfy the spatial, pictorial and design whim of her learned and fruitful imaginings. This random process creates a type of sensory jarring as typified by the surrealistic notion of “improbable association” to achieve a complete liberty of the unconscious as a kind of dream reality; to jolt the viewer out of ordinary perceptive complacency by changing the visual rules, and for the viewer to then have to in turn recalibrate their accepted daily reality to accommodate this new information.

This however is but one side of her equation. Randi also exquisitely and faithfully renders realistic detail and anatomical correctness, as evidenced in her remarkable series of drawings entitled “The future is open” where she runs the gauntlet between the polished skill of fine art and the raw chance of sophisticated doodling.

Hers is a classical art sensibility heightened by her willingness to dive into the cold light of modern and contemporary art innovation and arise on the other side in the clarity of the reborn.

This aspect is best witnessed in her delightful sketchy paintings of birds manifest in a thread of running skipping line at once tracing form, contour and full volume in a serious flowing of loopy linearity with great depth and subtle compositional expertise prior to colour taking their avian evocation to full-throttle.

Randi is also an art teacher and designer of theatre sets and costuming, as well as posters, validating her claim that “imagination is a useful creative power to humans – it is an instinct for survival – the subconscious is an eternal source to me, it brings to light the very mystery in my life…my recent pictures are about love and aspects of love (as always).”

“There is beauty everywhere. I look for it wherever I go and let it affect me,” she adds.

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